Naperville Smart Meter Awareness

“State power authorities approved a settlement in which PG&E will pay $390,000 for the company’s role in a 2010 corporate spying scandal that targeted opponents of SmartMeters, including those living in Sebastopol.”

“In November 2010, PG&E executive William Devereaux used a fake identity to access Internet-based forums hosted by meter opponents. Devereaux, who oversaw the $2.2 billion program, resigned from the company two days after the ruse was exposed.”

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130405/articles/130409725&tc=yahoo

A Sensus brand residential smart meter caught fire in Texas in January 2013.  (Full Story:  http://www.heraldchronicle.com/?p=5423)

“But as an added step to ensure that no other customers’ electric meters catch fire, a type of software is being installed in the meters that will enable them to shut off in the unlikely event a meter reaches a certain temperature.

‘“As a precaution of any such occurrences in the future, Sensus will be providing Winchester Utilities with firmware to be installed into the meters wirelessly,” Caldwell said. …”

The utility in Texas says: “We plan to continue doing whatever is necessary to protect the customer.”

On a side note – if a utility can remotely update the software inside the smart meter to monitor its internal temperature, what else can be updated?  What else can it monitor?

This 6-page research paper “Private Memoirs of a Smart Meter” was published by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2010 and explains the privacy impact to ratepayers.

http://www.ecs.umass.edu/~irwin/buildsys.pdf

This YouTube Video is of the 5pm news report on CBS 2 Chicago News from Naperville.